Circles

by Sophie Amado

Sonder (n): the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own; populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.[1]

I think what spurred my current obsession was an ad on the bus: “Dwell in the Now.” This sign was advertising an apartment hunting service so the idea of “nowness” was emphasized. Don’t wait. Get this apartment now. It made me wonder not about apartments, but about the concept of “now.” Or rather, how “now” is a very fast thing. A short-lived thing. Something I can’t really put my finger on.

Aristotle said, “not only do we measure the movement by the time, but also the time by the movement, because they define each other.”[2] So, if changes are measured by time and time by change, how do we measure now? Is there even such a thing?

In one now, I was walking past the Moody Church on Clark and North Avenue in Chicago. A large group of people were lined up for entry to a high school graduation. I was on my way to a yoga class in Wicker Park. By the time I returned, I saw far fewer people standing outside, only a few families still taking pictures or sitting on the curb. I had just finished my class while these young students had celebrated a monumental moment. Movement happened in time. Time created that movement. But I had experienced a very different moment than those other people during the same span of time. That moment for me felt fast, unimportant, and rushed probably because I wasn’t really as present in my yoga class as I should have been. I was distracted because the yoga class was held in the instructor’s apartment and while we were resting in final savasana he started cooking rice on the stove to eat for dinner. Instead of being “centered,” I was thinking about what I should eat for dinner afterwards, what I had to do, and how I had to take two buses to get home. On those buses home, I imagined the students and their time and how I felt during my own high school graduation. None of my emotions that day made sense, especially my sense of time, how vast that day felt, how long or short the ceremony seemed, how time then felt jarred because I was so excited to leave high school but so anxious to start college and so done with my friends at that point but also so emotional about leaving all of that behind for unknown adulthood. I imagined our thoughts—the high school students and mine—and our different senses of time like a symphony: mine staccato and abrupt while theirs were an uncertain andante.

One weekend, I was at my part-time bartending job entering a drink order on a computer touch screen. At this same time, my friend was flying from LA to Chicago. When he landed, he texted me what we both had been thinking: how strange that we were doing two completely different things at the same time. He bolting through the air at a fast pace while I was doing a mundane task at a restaurant. This suddenly became a daily fixation.

Once, I was waiting by a bus stop and two of the same numbered buses came towards me. I boarded the one in front since it looked empty and it was closer to my position. I wondered how different my life would have been if I had boarded the second one. In another universe, I did board that bus and nothing remarkable happened at all. Probably. But I’ll never know because in that past now, I choose one path over another. Or perhaps my life would have changed drastically. Maybe if I had boarded the second bus, I would have encountered a man choking on a granola bar, performed the Heimlich maneuver, and I would have saved his life. By boarding Bus #1, did I kill someone? Even more odd is that during my thoughts of which bus to choose, other things were happening: a couple broke up, a tulip bud blossomed, bread was being kneaded, a silo sat and held corn. And that’s just the way it was. For that now. An infinite ripple in the water pool that is time.

I wonder if other people think this way. While someone else is watching TV or doing their grocery shopping, is their mind thinking about what is happening to someone somewhere else? I wonder because this is something I do. A lot. Like a few weeks ago, I was in an airport alone and realized that I could just stay there forever and no one would notice that I had never left. People constantly enter and exit airports, but I would just be a human speck in someone else’s airport background. I cannot do this at the dentist office. I cannot sit there forever because the dentist is not a twenty-four-hour operating establishment. And even if it was, surely a doctor would notice if I hadn’t left my chair and ask me to leave for another patient’s turn. Whenever I’m at the dentist, I think about how six months prior I’d been sitting in the same chair and I reflect about everything that happened in between the me sitting in the chair six months ago and the me sitting in the same chair six months later. I wonder if I’m diseased by my thoughts about my experience of time. Is time perception a choice or a celestial sensation? I wonder if it would be better to not think this way.

Sometimes I pass the Metropolitan Correctional Center in the Loop of Chicago. It is a tall, pale, triangular building. The windows are not windows but rather thin, rectangular slits and to me it looks sturdier than other skyscrapers downtown. It’s a building I enjoy looking at while gazing at Chicago’s skyline, but this building is also its own little world that is very different than the one I’m immersed in when walking down Dearborn street. Inside this building are what society would deem “bad” people. And just like my friend on a plane in the sky while I was working, I found myself walking in the Loop while my headspace was inside the MCC, with the men and women who were serving gruesome sentences I couldn’t really imagine. While I was leaving Hero Coffee Bar with a $4.37 latte, someone in the Correctional Center was drinking a gross black coffee in the cafeteria to do something to make time go by quickly.

It’s difficult to think of all the simultaneous possible happenings at once, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. Right now, someone is walking their golden retriever, someone made a wrong turn and got hit by a truck, someone cut their finger with a knife while chopping a shallot, someone got engaged at a sport’s stadium, someone is painting a dining room crimson, and someone is waiting for a mushroom asparagus quiche to cool.

In the French film Amélie, the narrator says, “Amélie still seeks solitude. She amuses herself with silly questions about the world below, such as ‘How many people are having an orgasm right now?’” Scenes of various orgasms taking place and then Amélie says, “Fifteen.” Someone just had an orgasm. Someone else just got shot.

In the summer of 2016, I saw on TV the face of a little boy named Omran Daqneesh. He was not on the news for winning a medal or saving a cat from a tree; rather, his face went internationally viral, covered in dust and blood, after an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria. Airstrikes were his norm and as I watched the footage of him wiping his eye in an ambulance, I became numb. My mind then went to the image of a young girl named Phan Thị Kim Phúc in Vietnam covered in napalm. She is naked and terrified, just four years older than Omran, just four decades prior. Both of these people, these children, were victims of their previous generation, tied to war and destruction in which they had no business being ensnared. Destruction like this is far too common. Even more common is how much I don’t think about this. I am too far away doing something else.

How often do we choose our thoughts? Thoughts pop up so quickly I wonder if we let our minds select what we think about actively, or do we just let our thoughts fluctuate as they will?

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve hated the Chicago Air and Water Show. One time, a few family members took me downtown to watch the show at a penthouse owned by someone they knew and they both grew increasingly drunker as the day went on. I felt unsupervised and alone. In 2016, I lived right by North Avenue beach and my mornings were loud; the environment surrounding my neighborhood was polluted with unpleasant jet-noises (how very odd it is that there are some sounds more universally pleasant than others). U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds and F-35 Heritage planes flew around the city for four days (two for practice and two for the show). It drew thousands of viewers, local and visitors, to the city. That year, I thought about how the same kind of machines destroyed Omran’s home. I thought about huge questions like how could I fix the Middle East? The places on earth that live in constant distress? What could I do? As the planes danced around Chicago’s skyline, across the world they were terrorizing young children and families alike for contrasting beliefs. 

That same weekend as the Air and Water Show, a childhood friend called me and told me how over the weekend she had gone out drinking with her college roommates in Minneapolis. She felt good after this experience, claiming that her old college friends were people in her life who made her feel like her “full self.” So, then I had to wonder, what does a half self look like? A quarter self? This is a thought I am having now while someone else is wondering about what toppings to ask for while waiting for their phone line to connect to a pizzeria.

The mind is a stream and I am overwhelmed.

Once, I was watching the Navy Pier fireworks with a friend from graduate school. We talked about how the 4th of July was our favorite holiday. Despite how celebratory and lovely the fireworks look in the sky, I always think about the irony of fireworks’ association with this holiday. Yes, Americans gained independence from the British, but surely the fireworks sounded like riffles, cannons, the same kind that killed many lives during the Revolutionary War and subsequent military combat. Just like the Air and Water Show, fireworks are something destructive turned beautiful. Chicago in particular struggles during this holiday. Guns are shot. Guns can be shot because they sound like fireworks. The fireworks hide the gunshot sounds and many people claim to be able to tell the difference between the two. This holiday is not safe.

Are all of these thoughts just coincidence? The mind has thoughts all over the place. Our brain is a continuum of thoughts while things are happening outside of the mind. I wonder where I’m supposed to put my focus.

There is an old cliché about the way you look at a glass and where the water inside lands at the halfway mark. Is it half full or half empty? Are you a positive person or a negative one? There are so many different ways to view the world and all that’s happening in it. What’s happening in Syria? In Austria? In Brazil? What is happening there, now, while I just sit thinking about it? I imagine that someone else saw Omran’s video and didn’t think about it as much as I do. I imagine someone else saw that video and now runs an activist organization to help Syrian refugees. A glass half full person would do the latter while a glass half empty person walks on by without being disrupted by thoughts of Omran. The news and social media have ways of diverting our attention so quickly that I doubt anyone really thinks of Omran anymore, even though he is still living his life, somewhere, right now, whether agitated or calm, whether distressed or forgetful. Right now, I am typing my thoughts while I imagine you, someone, are reading this, if you are even there. And if you are not, you are probably brushing your hair, or unpeeling a clementine, or watching your wife give birth, or stretching your calf muscles before running a marathon, or none of the above, but doing one of all the possible things to do right now while people around you are doing things too, similarly or not. Just like how the people trapped inside the MCC are doing things. Or how you are doing things. Or Omran. And if I think about the people in the MCC, or my friend on the phone, or Aleppo, or my own memories, or how my friend flew in a plane while I was working, or all of the possibilities going on in this moment all at once, am I dwelling in the now?

[1] Organizing Creativity

[2] UCA